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I used to be Irish
Catholic.

I used to be Irish Catholic. Now I’m an American—you grow. George
Carlin

The single greatest influence in our lives
was the church. The Catholic Church in the 1960s differs from what it is today,
especially in the Naugatuck Valley, in those days an overwhelmingly
conservative Catholic place.

I was part of what might have been the last
generation of American Catholic children who completely and unquestioningly
accepted the supernatural as real. Miracles happened. Virgin birth and
transubstantiation made perfect sense. Mere humans did in fact, become saints.
There was a Holy Ghost. Guardian angels walked beside us and our patron saints
really did put in a good word for us every now and then.

Church was at the center of our lives. Being a Roman Catholic back then was no small
chore. In fact, it was a lot of work. The Mass was in Latin, conducted with the
priest’s back to the flock. (We were a flock. Protestant were the more
democratically named “congregation.”)

Aside from Sunday Mass there were also eleven
Holy Days of Obligation that we had to attend, and then there were the
all-important sacraments of First Confession, First Communion, and
Confirmation, all ornate and dramatic affairs that happened within a few years
of each other.

We dressed properly in a suit coat and tie
for Sunday mass. Fridays were meatless as a means of penance. At school, there
was prayer in the morning before classes began, prayer before lunch, prayer
after lunch and prayer before we went home. There was also a half-hour of
religion class every day. And there was fasting. In those days, Catholics
fasted eight hours before receiving communion.

Then there was confession on Saturday,
mandatory because Sunday Mass was also mandatory and so was taking Holy
Communion, which could not be accepted without first going to confession. We had to go to confession twice in a week:
once on Fridays, since the nuns were convinced none of us would go on our own
over the weekend, and then once again on Saturday afternoons when Helen made us
go.

When I made my first confession at age seven,
we were taught that there were two types of sin: mortal sins, which were
serious sins, and venial sins, which were lesser sins, lying and disobedience. The nuns said that we
would have to narrow our selection to venial sins since we were far too young
to have any mortal sins against our soul.

One of little girls in the group raised her
hand and asked, “What’s adultery?”

“Nothing to worry yourself over, dear,” the
nun answered, “It’s for adults, and it is a most grievous offense against God.”
I liked the sound of that, “most grievous offense against God.” Sounded
serious.

Confession was a big deal and involved a lot
of formality—kneeling in darkness, foreign languages, and solemnity—and I
didn’t waste all that somberness with unworthy sins, so when the priest slid
open the little wooden door that separated us in the dark I began my prayer.

“Deus meus, ex toto corde paenitet me omnium
meorum peccatorum—” In full, the words meant “O my God, I am heartily sorry for
having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins because I fear the loss of
heaven and the pains of hell, but most of all because they offend Thee, my God,
Who art all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve with the help
of Thy grace to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life. Amen.”

Then the sins were confessed. I told the
priest I had committed adultery.

“Adultery, huh?” the priest said.

“Yes, Father,” I answered as solemnly as I
could. “Adultery.”

“So, how’d that work out for you?” he asked.

“Ah,” I answered, “you know.”

“No,” he said, “actually I don’t. So how many
times did you do this, this adultery?”

“Like, I think, three times, Father.”

“I see,” he said. “And during those times,
were you alone or with others?”

“No, Father,
I was alone.”

“And do you think you’ll be committing this
sin again in the near future?”

“Naw, Father,” I answered. “I’m pretty much
over it.”

As the years went and I became more
confessional-savvy, I learned that the dumber the sin, the lighter the penance,
the prayer for forgiveness that one was required to say up at the altar after
the confession had ended.

So in the name of efficiency, I developed a
pre-packaged list of dumb sins, like “I disobeyed my mother,” or “I fought with
my brother,” or “I failed to say my nightly prayer.”

Through trial and error, I learned that every
now and then I would have to toss a more serious sin into the mix or the
priests might get testy and tax me with a big penance. So I tossed in the
fail-safe sex sin, “I had evil thoughts about _____” and would fill in the name
of the girl who struck me at the moment. I rotated the sins and the priests,
and, overall, the system worked.

One Saturday, Denny and his gang of
desperadoes showed up for confession and slid into the pew with me and waited
for our turn at the confessional.

Denny turned to me and said, “Johnny, you got
any good sins?”

Feeling magnanimous, I shared my formula for
a hassle-free confession, and in closing said, “And then you say ‘I had evil
thoughts about Mary Puravich,’ or whatever,’” using the name of a pretty girl
from my class.

Denny shared my sin system with his friends,
who were always in a hurry to cut their way to the front of the line, have
their confessions heard, and leave without saying their penance. I went in to
the confessional and said my piece, ending with, “and I had evil thoughts about
Mary Puravich.”

“You know,” said the priest, “I gotta meet
this Mary Puravich. She must be some kind of knockout, because the last four
guys in here said the same thing about her.”

For all purposes, school was an extension of
church, and unlike the way we lived in Waterbury, school was no longer
optional. We were to be at Our Lady of the Assumption Catholic School, in
uniform, Monday through Friday from eight a.m. until three p.m. No excuses.

Because I lacked almost any formal education
at that point, I couldn’t read or write, so it was decided that I should start
school from the beginning—first grade—making me roughly two years older than my
classmates.

Assumption was already over fifty years old.
Walter and his sisters had been schooled there in the 1930s and the building ,
basically unchanged, had nothing sleek or new. It had sixteen classrooms for
two hundred and fifty students, no gymnasium or cafeteria, highly polished
wooden floors, and enormously large windows that each had to be opened and
closed with a long pole with a hook on the end of it.

Our teachers were members of the Sisters of
Mercy, an order formed in Ireland in 1831 to aid the poor, arriving in America
in 1843 to minister to the famished Irish flocking to the states. Several of
the nuns who had taught Walter were still living at the convent and filling in
as substitute teachers, and one or two of them were still teaching full-time.

Classes began with the ringing of an enormous
brass handbell by a nun who was strong enough to pick it up and move it around.
Boys and girls played apart from each other on different sides of the school
yard. The boys were clad in white shirts and green ties with the letter A sewn
into the middle of them, black slacks, black socks, and black lace-up shoes.
Loafers and pointed-toe shoes, then all the rage because of the Beatles, were
forbidden. The girls were required to wear black Mary Janes, white or green
knee socks, and a green dress uniform with an under slip, and a white,
button-down shirt. They were also issued green beanies to wear in church,
although I can’t recall that any of the girls ever wore one.

Just beneath the schoolyard was Farrell’s
Foundry. At different times of the day, the mill released its afterburn from
the enormous smokestacks that dotted the skyline. Tens of thousands of black
specks shot into the air, making it look like a black-snow blizzard had hit our
little town. The specks rained down on our white shirts, ruining them forever
with ink-black spots of burned iron.

Every school day started with a prayer, followed
by the Pledge of Allegiance and then religion class. Sometimes one of the
priests stopped by during religion class and opened the floor to discussions,
wrongly assuming the questions would be deep and theological. What he got was,
“Father, all right, look, if the Russians fired an atomic bomb at us and Jesus
flies out of heaven and swallows it and it explodes in his stomach—will he be
dead?”

The best one came from Peggy Sullivan, who
asked, “If Jesus shaves off his beard, will he lose all his magical powers?”
and then, pausing to catch her breath, “and if so, how screwed are we?”

One kid in the class, Patsy Sheehan, resented
having to learn certain things about our religion the difference between venial
sins and mortal sins, the Act of Contrition and so on. When the priest told us
we that we had to choose a middle name for our confirmation, Patsy complained,
“I got enough on my plate already.”

Then there was Martin O’Toole, a wonderful,
magnificent liar. He lied in such awesome, Herculean fashion that his tales
were artful, Homeric. Our nun once asked, “Mr. O’Toole, why have you not turned
in your homework?”

Martin waited until he had everyone’s
attention and then stood slowly and dramatically from his desk, put his hands
on his tiny waist and said, “Sister, last night I was in my back yard playing
when I picked up a rock from the ground.” He then recounted the scene of him
picking up what must have been a boulder the size of Rhode Island, “and as soon
as I picked it up, oil! Bubbling crude came bursting out of the ground,
millions of gallons of it! I was soaked in oil.” He paused and looked around
the room and added, in hushed tones, “It took me hours to put that rock back on
that oil and save this entire city.”

He returned to his seat and said, “And that’s
why I didn’t time to do my homework, Sister.”

The nun’s jaw had dropped, and the silence of
the moment was broken only when Micky Sullivan, a dense and gullible child,
asked, “What kind of oil was it, Martin?”

“Esso,” he replied. “It was Esso oil.”

Many years later, Johnny became mayor of a
small town in the Valley. An investigation of the town’s finances showed fifty
thousand dollars missing from the treasury and all the evidence pointed to
Martin. When asked to produce the town’s books, Martin said, that “The books
are gone. Mice ate them.” He served two years in federal prison.

Then there was Ilene Flynn, a little
red-haired, freckled-faced, fair-skinned girl who was more pious than the Pope.
I knew a lot about her because the nuns thought we looked alike and paired me
with her for all religious functions.

At our First Holy Communion, Ilene was so
nervous her mouth went dry. Unable to swallow the host and forbidden to touch
it—only a priest could do that—she ran around in circles crying hysterically,
“Jesus is stuck in my mouth! Jesus is stuck in my mouth!” while the nuns
flocked around her shouting instructions about swallowing, “Go like this,
Ilene, go like this!” and then they did a swallowing demonstration that made
them look a lot like penguins eating long fish.

Ilene’s Friday afternoon confessions were
epic. She confessed to everything, I mean absolutely everything, and she
actually said all of her penance, unlike the rest of us who negotiated a
lighter-sentence deal with God before we got to the rail. My policy on penance
was one for five. If I were given thirty Hail Marys as penance, in the deal God
and I worked out, I said six.

Once, Ilene came out of the confessional in
tears, wailing loud enough to wake the dead.

“What is it, Ilene?” Sister asked. “What
happened?”

“Father O’Leary told me I’m going to hell on
a lying rap,” she wailed, “and I don’t know what a rap is!”

Welcome, enjoy!

My writers site (Click the book above)

"Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God's handwriting -- a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.” Emerson

A (person) should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul. ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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"The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanely sensitive. To them... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create -- so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, their very breath is cut off... They must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency they are not really alive unless they are creating."Pearl Buck

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Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures. ~Henry Ward Beecher

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. ~Scott Adams

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary. ~Pablo Picasso

Art is the only way to run away without leaving home. ~Twyla Tharp

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. ~William Faulkner

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up. ~Pablo Picasso

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. ~Stella Adler

Painting is silent poetry. ~Plutarch, Moralia: How to Study Poetry

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen. ~Leonardo da Vinci

It has been said that art is a tryst, for in the joy of it maker and beholder meet. ~Kojiro Tomita

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in. ~Amy Lowell

To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist. ~Schumann

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies. ~Pablo Picasso

I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things. ~Henri Matisse

The artist uses the talent he has, wishing he had more talent. The talent uses the artist it has, wishing it had more artist. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one. ~Charles Horton Cooley

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. ~Isaac Bashevis Singer

To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way. ~E.M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951

Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail. ~Theodore Dreiser, Life, Art, and America, 1917

The artist's world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep. ~Paul Strand

All art requires courage. ~Anne Tucker

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. ~Oscar Wilde

Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do. ~Edgar Degas

It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work. ~Henry Moore

Pictures must not be too picturesque. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better. ~André Gide

But that's what being an artist is - feeling crummy before everyone else feels crummy. ~The New Yorker

Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass. ~Fran Lebowitz

Great art picks up where nature ends. ~Marc Chagall

When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college - that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?" ~Howard Ikemoto

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame. ~G.K. Chesterton

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. ~John Updike

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe, he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life. ~Henry Miller
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. ~Oscar Wilde

Let me ask you something, what is not art? ~Author Unknown

The painter puts brush to canvas, and the poet puts pen to paper. The poet has the easier task, for his pen does not alter his rhyme. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he - for some reason - thinks it would be a good idea to give them. ~Andy Warhol

The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art. ~Kenneth Tynan

God and other artists are always a little obscure. ~Oscar Wilde

For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh. ~Georges Rouault

Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. ~T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919

There is no surer method of evading the world than by following Art, and no surer method of linking oneself to it than by Art. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Art is... a question mark in the minds of those who want to know what's happening. ~Aaron Howard

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for. ~Georgia O'Keeffe

Man will begin to recover the moment he takes art as seriously as physics, chemistry or money. ~Ernst Levy

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea. ~John Anthony Ciardi

As far as I am concerned, a painting speaks for itself. What is the use of giving explanations, when all is said and done? A painter has only one language. ~Pablo Picasso

The world today doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do? ~Pablo Picasso

Sometimes, to pursue a new idea, the artist must forfeit his deposit on an old idea. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I want to reach that condensation of sensations that constitutes a picture. ~Henri Matisse, Notes d'un peintre, 1908

Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness. ~George Jean Nathan, House of Satan

One of the best things about paintings is their silence - which prompts reflection and random reverie. ~Mark Stevens

God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things. ~Pablo Picasso

Art hath an enemy called ignorance. ~Ben Jonson

What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art. ~Augustus Saint-Gaudens

Art... does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon. ~Agnes Repplier, Points of View, 1891

Art disturbs, science reassures. ~Georges Braque, Le Jour et la nuit

As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life. ~John Lubbock

It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man. ~Loren Eiseley, The Night Country, 1971

Art is spirituality in drag. ~Jennifer Yane

The artist's talent sits uneasy as an object of public acclaim, having been so long an object of private despair. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Reflexes and instincts are not pretty. It is their decoration that initiates art. ~Martin H. Fischer

What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose. ~Willa Cather

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world. ~George Santayana

Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization. ~Lincoln Steffens

Art is not a thing; it is a way. ~Elbert Hubbard

An artist's career always begins tomorrow. ~James McNeill Whistler

The artist is a receptacle for the emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web. ~Pablo Picasso

Surely nothing has to listen to so many stupid remarks as a painting in a museum. ~Edmond & Jules de Goncourt

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere. ~G.K. Chesterton

Artistry is an innate distrust of the theory of reality concocted by the five senses. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Grammar stops at love, and at art. ~Terri Guillemets

The true painter strives to paint what can only be seen through his world. ~André Malraux

An artist never really finishes his work; he merely abandons it. ~Paul Valéry

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is. ~Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark, 1915

A subject that is beautiful in itself gives no suggestion to the artist. It lacks imperfection. ~Oscar Wilde

An artist cannot talk about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture. ~Jean Cocteau, Newsweek, 16 May 1955

The artist does not see things as they are, but as he is. ~Alfred Tonnelle

A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened. ~Albert Camus

An artist's instinct is more refined than the typical mortal's. ~Holden Rinehart

For the mystic what is how. For the craftsman how is what. For the artist what and how are one. ~William McElcheran

O, how much simpler things would be
If eyes could paint or brush could see.
~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Art is a kind of illness. ~Giacomo Puccini

A great artist is always before his time or behind it. ~George Moore

A man and his art are like a fool and his king. ~Corri Alius

A painting is what you make of it, besides which, 'Moon, Weeping' has a better ring to it than 'Paintbrush, Dripping.' ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum. ~Claes Oldenburg

Science is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon eternal truths. Art is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon things beautiful and immortal and ever-changing. To morals belong the lower and less intellectual spheres. ~Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, 1891

While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality... true art lies in a reality that is felt. ~Odilon Redon

The first assumption of an art critic is that the artist meant to paint something else. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

The question of common sense is always what is it good for? - a question which would abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage. ~James Russell Lowell

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. ~Aristotle

Art is when you hear a knocking from your soul - and you answer. ~Terri Guillemets

Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping. ~Jean Cocteau

Any great work of art... revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air. ~Leonard Bernstein, What Makes Opera Grand?

There is in every artist's studio a scrap heap of discarded works in which the artist's discipline prevailed against his imagination. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Art, as far as it is able, follows nature, as a pupil imitates his master; thus your art must be, as it were, God's grandchild. ~Dante Alighieri, Inferno

A portrait has one advantage over its original: it is unconscious; and you may therefore admire without insulting it. I have seen portraits which have more. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die. ~Thomas Carlyle, Latter Day Pamphlets, no. 8

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable. ~George Bernard Shaw

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands. ~Michelangelo

Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid. ~Jules Feiffer

All the other colors are just colors, but purple seems to have a soul. Purple is not just a noun and an adjective but also a verb - when you look at it, it's looking back at you. ~Uniek Swain

Architecture begins where engineering ends. ~Walter Gropius

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling. ~G.K. Chesterton

Why should I paint dead fish, onions and beer glasses? Girls are so much prettier. ~Marie Laurencin

Art is Man's nature. Nature is god's art. ~James Bailey

The artist gazes upon a reality and creates his own impression. The viewer gazes upon the impression and creates his own reality. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together. ~John Ruskin

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